The Boat

Starred review from March 31, 2008
From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In “Halflead Bay,” an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of “Meeting Elise,” a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies—“You could totally
exploit the Vietnamese thing,” says a fellow student to Nam—are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure.

May 1, 2008
Born in Vietnam, Le was raised in Australia, where he trained as a lawyer, and came to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. So it might panic a few readers that the protagonist of the first story in this stellar debut collection is the Vietnam-born Nam, a former lawyer from Australia trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when his estranged father blows into town. Will this be a bunch of autobiographical stories exemplifying "ethnic fiction" (which the story actually manages, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely notunless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to kill a friend; a crotchety if successful painter coming to terms with a cancer diagnosis just as the daughter he's never met prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut; a high school boy in Australia who's achieved a modest sports victory and must face down a bully as his mother faces death; and an American woman visiting a friend in Tehran who risks her life battling the regime. Le writes rawly rigorous stories that capture entire worlds; each character is distinctive and fully fleshed out, each plot eventful as a full-length novel but artfully compressed. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/08.]Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2008
This collection of seven short stories and novellas features four works that were previously issued in literary publications and three new to this volume. Stories are set on six continents and at sea, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and have characters ranging in age from childhood through the senior years. Many explore the intricate loyalties and betrayals in family life: notably, Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, in which a Vietnamese Australian 'migr' studying at the University of Iowas writers program experiences his fathers final brutality, and Halflead Bay, in which a teenage boy struggles with the father and brother who rescue him from a vicious schoolmate. Less-memorable characters are portrayed through intense physical and sexual description. They are brought to life in powerful stories of love and death through a muscular yet delicate style: lyrical, often poetic, leaving the obvious unsaid and endings ambiguous. Readers of Philip Roth and Andr' Brink, as well as those who enjoy complex and emotion-charged short fiction, will devour this book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)